Review by Allen Best
Local History – February 2001 – Colorado Central Magazine
Vail: Triumph of a Dream
By Peter W. Seibert with William Oscar Johnson
published in 2000 by Mountain Sports Press
ISBN 0-9676747-1-9
The Inventors of Vail
By Dick Hauserman
Published in 2000 by Golden Peak Publishing Co., Edwards, Colo.
ISBN 0-9704438-0-3
FOR STUDENTS OF SYMBOLISM, there is ample material in the stories of two generations of Pete Seibert. Pete, the elder, spent a portion of his youth as a miner in Leadville, where he worked until 1920, when he suffered a broken jaw during a cave-in. There were, he decided, better ways to make a living.
Returning to New England, he sired Pete the Junior, who at age 12 began nurturing the dream of someday having his own ski resort. That dream stayed alive as he trained at Camp Hale during World War II, unaware of the great, wide bowls only three or four miles away that are now officially registered as the Back Bowls.
In an ironic way, World War II probably made Seibert’s dream possible. As a platoon sergeant he commanded a night-time assault up the cliffs and ice falls of Riva Ridge, helping get the 10th Mountain Division’s toe in the door of German defenses in Italy. Weeks later a mortar attack maimed Seibert from head to toe.
The heroics continued in Aspen, where Seibert went after spending 17 months in hospitals. He not only defied predictions that he would never walk again, but he went on to become one of the nation’s top ski racers — despite lingering injuries (including a missing kneecap) that forced him to essentially ski on one leg.
DESPITE A BEGUILING LIFE of waiting tables, drinking beer, and chasing women, Seibert had a bigger dream. In 1950 he set out for Europe to study hotel and resort management. He managed Loveland Ski Area, helped build Aspen Highlands, and wandered the Rocky Mountains in search of the best ski area site. One summer he worked as a night auditor at Silverton’s Grand Imperial Hotel so that he could scout possible ski area sites by day.
His Vail discovery occurred in March 1957, directed by Eagle Valley native Earl Eaton. From there, it was a matter of getting money and Forest Service permission. Neither came easily. The Forest Service wanted to t let Aspen Highlands become profitable before approving Vail, and it took Wayne Aspinall, congressman for Western Colorado, to reverse that veto. Ironically, Seibert then objected in vain that the Forest Service had authorized Breckenridge to start at the same time.
As for money, the Small Business Administration and a Denver bank came up with $500,000, but another $1.1 million had to be raised from limited partners — ex-classmates, relatives, and other shirt-tail acquaintances — willing to pay $5,000 each. Promises of life-time skiing privileges persuaded few, but lots in the base area did attract investors. Real estate has long been a component of the ski business.
Vail, on its first day of operation in 1962, was the nation’s largest ski area, but it wasn’t always the busiest. One day that first season there were only 12 paying customers. Success was incremental, but Seibert’s boyhood dream had come true.
Seibert’s story of success is told well by former Sports Illustrated staff writer William Oscar Johnson in Vail: Triumph of a Dream. The success was also tarnished. There was the gondola crash in 1976 that killed four people; then the sale to a Dallas oilman who immediately fired Seibert; and finally the unsuccessful attempt to recreate Vail’s magic at Snowbasin, a Utah resort that ironically now is likely to achieve that success as site of the 2002 Winter Olympics. Seibert’s financial gain in all of this has been modest.
Also detailing Vail’s early years is The Inventors of Vail, by Dick Hauserman. Hauserman was among the original investors in Vail, and a key figure on the board of directors. He and Seibert butted heads more than 30 years ago, and they still do. Hauserman describes Seibert, the skiing dreamer, as a marginally incompetent manager.
As the name of his book implies, Hauserman paints a broader picture of Vail’s success. He tells of the Austrian restaurateurs, the ski bums who became managers, and the local Hispanic stonemasons who became millionaires. Mostly, it is about the “swells,” i.e. the people of great wealth who left behind manicured lawns to be part of this new snow-and-mud novelty in the Rockies. They had to drive to Glenwood Springs to watch on television the games of the football teams they owned.
Together, these books show that Vail, and by extension much of the Colorado ski industry, never was the simplified mom-and-pop business that it has sometimes been represented as, and they also show how seat-of-the-pants even corporate ski area management has sometimes been. Skiing was, finally, a business, but one largely dominated by people who were driven by love of sport and addicted to a lifestyle. That lifestyle still exists, although perhaps in a different form.
WHAT BOTH BOOKS LACK is introspection. For example, early on the Vail founders created their own school, because the public schools were inferior. Could they have worked with the local schools to effect a better school system? The dreamer of Vail and the inventors of Vail don’t let on that they gave this any thought.
Also lacking is an explanation of broader vision. Seibert clearly liked what he saw in the Alps, and he has largely succeeded in replicating it in Colorado. In mid-December, Pete’s Bowl was opened, completing what Seibert envisioned 40 years ago. It was a triumph for Seibert, but why was that vision good?
What becomes evident — ironically, given his criticism of Seibert, it’s more obvious in Hauserman’s book — is the power of Seibert’s personality. There were challenges in creating a new resort. First, there was the matter of integrating into the network of big-moneyed, high-powered WASPs.
How did Seibert manage it? First, he married into money. Second, he survived the war. Being shot at with only middlin’ success gave Seibert the gumption to shoot high, which he did. It took electricity to coalesce that many people of disparate backgrounds into one unifying vision. Seibert was that spark plug.
That Vail came to be was not so much a matter of if, or even of when, but by whom. These books tell about those people, and help us understand the foundation of the resort and leisure economies of the late 20th century. In time, we may look back upon this new economy with the same wonder that we now reserve for the silver magnates: Pete Seibert and Horace Tabor, two souls of the same cloth, but a century apart.
— Allen Best
